The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
In the first canto, while reading this line'The tide is full, the moon lies fair' I see that the water reflects the image of moon.
ReplyDeleteUpon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
The poet says light is gone that is to say once faith in God was strong but now it began to be feeble.
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
While he says begin and cease he refers to the trembling between the order and chaos, catastrophe.
In the second canto,he refers to Antigone by Sopochles and he means that whoever violate the order he will be punished.And the poet like humanbeing is in a miserable situation in this poem.
While we see the ‘distant northernsea’, we feel the coldness and isolation.
And in the last canto, we see the contrast : the positive idea of nature and then the struggle, confusion and clash.
In general , poet says that once upon a time ,the faith in God was powerful and and now the science challanges the theology and religion.That causes doubt,despair chaos and people feel abondoned,lonely.As a result people makes for the material things.
TülayÖrücü
ReplyDeleteDover Beach is a melancholic poem.Matthew Arnold projects human feelings onto the sea and we can get the sense of a chaos coming on the way.We hear the sound of the sea as "the eternal note of sadness''.Arnold turns to the action of the tide itself and sees in its retreat a metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age.
in this poem, poet tries to give the message that the world is in a chaos situation now and religion is losing its image it is waning. so science will take its place. so culture starts to become decayed with the fading faith of religion.
ReplyDeletehe gives his message through using images from the nature. for example 'the sea'. and he mentions a light on the dover beach. it indicates the light of religion. and he explains that the light on the dover beach is fading. this expression indicates the light of religion is fading as well. because the liaght on the dover beach stands for religion.
as you know, this poem is my presentetion and ı really like it.
ReplyDeletein this poem matthew arnold's central message is dwindling faith of people in God and religious. Because in Victorian period people affected from the scientific searches such as Darwin's theory and Frech naturalist Jean Bastiste Lamack's searces. So the existence of God and religion was in doubt in this period.
we can see some examples which related to this subject and I want to share them with you.
In first stanza,with the expression of 'on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone;' He want to say that the light of faith in God and religion, once strong, now started to be flickers.
Other than this,Arnold hears the sound of the sea as the 'eternal note of sadness'
Sophocles, who was a 5th century BC playwright and wrote tragedies of fate and the will of Gods, heard this same sound as he stood upon the shore of the aegean Sea.
By saying this, Arnold support his idea of retreating of religion faith with sophocles.
when we look at the 3rd stanza, we can see Arnold's goal clearly. he says that there was a time when faith in God was strong and comforting. this faith wrapped itself around us,protecting us from doubt and despair, as the sea itself around the continents and islands of the world.
Now, however, the sea of faith become o sea of doubt.
science challenges the precepts of theology and religion.
Human misery makes people abandoned, lonely. People place their faith in material things.
ın the 4th stanza, Arnold was a little bit hopeful. he pleased that religious people cling to each other against a land that is beautiful as only an exterior to an unfeeling, Godless world.
Arnold sees the action of the tide as a metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age(Listen! you hear the grating roar). Poet tries to explain the situation the world is in (a chaos) and religion is decaying. And this bring the end of faith in God and religio(The eternal note of sadness in.)
ReplyDeleteThe final stanza begins with an appeal to love, then moves on to the famous ending metaphor –the first two lines- meaning "a stand against a world of broken faith".
The "darkling plain" of the final line has been used to explain the modern age human condition as an obscurity becoming darker and darker day by day through losing faith.
We see a melancholic atmosphere in this poem. Poet feels very sad about the chaos that occurs at that time. The faith to God and order is lost and he is struggling about this. He describes the things with the natural images- a beach. in this discribtion everything seems to be ok but actually there is a big problem with order.especially when we look at the 1st stanza we see that everything seems calm down but this reflects that the faith (the light the hope) is gone. But he has still the idea of peace. He is still struggling and resisting the change that occurs around.
ReplyDeletesedef konuk
ReplyDeleteThe Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
...
ın these lines he compares the sea with religious faith in that way:
We have the ebb and flow of the sea. And Christian religious faith is likened to the flow of the sea. the flow of the sea covered everything in the world as religious faith did. Religious faith was complete and in everywhere.
Arnold tries to convey ideas such as the beauty of the beach, reality and faith. Faith is maybe more important. He explains how faith has changed through passing time.While expressing this, he uses metaphors successfuly. For example:
ReplyDeleteThe tides coming and going represent the lack of faith in people.
He keeps his ideas not upon the surface.for instance when we look into the first stanza, upon the surface we can only imagine a peaceful environment.However in depth there is an unpeaceful one. So as to understand him fully, person should look into poem deeply.
İlknur Kaya
ReplyDeleteThis poem is full of metaphors.For example, the line "The sea of faith" refers to the faith and appreciation that people put in themselves.So when it says that the sea of faith was once, at the full, it is saying that people had a lot of faith in themselves in nature but we don't anymore.“But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world” means that now people are losing their faith so the world is becoming much more bare without beautiy. Most probably because people place less importance on nature and emotions.The last two lines of the poem, “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight where ignorant armies clash by night,” most likely refers to opposing people fighting and going to war, but they don’t even know what they’re fighting about.
Jiyan TAHER says :
ReplyDeleteThis poem refers to the industrial revolution which was a big change of life for everybody. At that time many people were very unhappy with their new life.
I honestly believe that Arnold is talking about how the question of faith has left the world in darkness. In the beginning of the poem, he expresses how calm averything seems, and it's like any other night. However, as the poem progresses, he mentions how Sophocles heard the sadness in the Aegean sea, just as he was hearing the sadness in his own sea. In mentioning the Sea of Faith, he reveals that while it looks calm and normal on the surface, really, the sea is singing a song of sadness and despair. during this time, people began questioning religion and turning to Darwinism. Arnold is expressing how people used to not think twice about what they believed, but now the world was unsure. In telling his love to stay true to him, he is hoping that at least one thing in the world will remain the same and true. To him, the world was left in darkness by the threat against faith.
ReplyDeleteGKHNOZKAN :
ReplyDeleteI just wanted to translate the poem :
DOVIR KUMSALI
Deniz sakin bu gece
Sular yükselmiş, ay yerde
Boğazın üzerinden, karşı kıyıda bir ışık, ,
Parlarken ve yiterken, adanın yamaçları
Engin ve ışıldayan, sessiz bir körfezin dışında durmaktadır.
Pencereye gel! Ancak, dalgaların vurduğu
Ve denizle yakamozun buluştuğu yerden
Gece rüzgarı çok güzel.
Dinle! Duyarsın dalgaların sürükleyip fırlattığı
Dönüşlerinde, sahilin üstünden
Çakıl taşlarının kükreyişini,
Başla, dur ve başla yeniden ve getir
Titrek, aheste ve biraz da ahenkli
Hazanın sonsuz ezgisini.
Uzun zaman önce duydu
Şair onu ege denizinde
Aklına geldi insan sefaletinin bulanık gel-gitleri,
Ve biz de bir düşünce bulduk sesin içinde
Dinleyerek onu uzak kuzey denizinde
Sadakat denizi de
Bir zamanlar kabarmıştı ve parlak bir kemerin katları gibi
Sarmıştı yeryüzünün tüm sahillerini
Ama şimdi tek duyduğum
Dünyanın çıplak çakıl taşlarından ve engin, kasvetli kıyılarından aşağı,
Geri çekilen bir gece rüzgarı nefesine
Hüzünlü, uzun ve içe kapanık ağlayışı.
Dürüst olalım birbirimize sevgilim,
Çünkü bu dünya huzurumuzda uzanan düşler diyarı gibi
Bu kadar güzel, bu kadar yeni ve bu kadar hengameli
Ve önümüzde gibi görünse de
Ama aslında ne bir huzur, ne bir neşe ne de bir acıya çare
Ve biz burada karanlık bir ovada gibi
Bilinçsiz orduların geceleri çatıştığı yerde
Uğraşının ve kaçışın yersiz dehşetiyle bozguna uğradık.
In this poem, the part which I liked most is the stanza which there is a reference to Sophocles. The speaker gets fearful with the sounds of the tide through the end of the first stanza. Because he is, now, getting closer to the realization of bitter truth: his woman's disloyalty. Likewise, Sophocles had heard the same sounds when he was inspired to write his tragedies near the Aegaean sea. the misfortunes in his tragedies seem similar to the speaker.
ReplyDeletein this poem, we can see the frustration of the poet for seeing that the belief of god in people is coming accross with a decreasing.
ReplyDeletepeople start to believe that god doesnt exist. he drows an image of a sea. the sea is calm and straight on the surface.
everything is peaceful. but when we try to lşsten attentively, we hear the great roaring of the waves.
it indicates a bad things happening.
and he says, previously, everything was surrended by faith but now all the honest and purity are unfolded. and we can not see any innosence now.
Dover Beach is a poem with the mournful tone of an elegy and the intensity of a dramatic monologue.Because the meter and rhyme vary from line to line, the poem is said to be in free verse that is, it is unencumbered by the strictures of traditional versification.
ReplyDeletesevil özkan
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKQ1QjgHSmw
here is the poem with the music.
hanım öncel
ReplyDeleteThe poet begins the poem as telling us thhat the sea is calm weather is windy and everything is in order but as we continue to read the poem we see that when we listen deeply we will hear the crying of the sea and chaos.
The reason of this chaos is loss of faith in God accordin to poet.There were time when the faith was but now the faith is about to go andpeople will suffer because of the loss of the faith.
Poet tell us about Sophocles we see allusion here.Sophocles heard the same voice of the eagean sea about loss of faith like Arnold hears.
"Dover Beach" is a melancholic poem. Matthew Arnold uses the means of 'pathetic fallacy', when he attributes or rather projects the human feeling of sadness onto an inanimate object like the sea. At the same time he creates a feeling of 'pathos'. The reader can feel sympathy for the suffering lyrical self, who suffers under the existing conditions.
ReplyDeleteThe repetition of "is" in lines 1-4 is used to illustrate the nightly seaside scenery:
The sea is calm tonight, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; . . . [emphasis mine]
It leads up to an eventual climax with 'the light/ gleams and is gone' . The first two is portray what can be seen. The last 'is' emphasises that the light is not there, that it cannot be seen any longer, but is gone and leaves nothing but darkness behind. In a metaphorical sense of the word, not only the light is gone, but also certainty. The darkness makes it hard to define both one's own and somebody else's position, and one can never be certain that the light will ever return.
GULNOZA
ReplyDelete"Dover Beach," like Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," contrasts the present and the deep past. For Keats, the nightingale uttered a wordless, melancholic beauty that Biblical Ruth also heard. A glimpse of time past proves consoling. When Arnold looks out a window onto Dover beach, he instead hears the "grating roar" caused by the waves of the English Channel as they strike the shoreline at the base of the great chalk cliffs; and he thinks of the "mournful roar" of which Sophocles wrote in Antigone. At poem's end, Arnold also remembers the chaotic night-battle at Epipolae when Athenian warriors, unable to see, killed friend and enemy alike. Time past for Arnold forewarns humanity of its sad destiny. Keats escaped the miseries of his present by entering the afterdeath ecstasy of the nightingale's world. Arnold escaped ancient reminders of "human misery," "alarm and flight," by dwelling on present tenderness: a calm sea, sweet night-air, and his beloved by his side. Time past, yoked to time present, reveals how fragile is the basis of human happiness. Keats closes his ode, asking if he dreams or wakes. Arnold ends his lyric, leaving no doubt that our "land of dreams" is a sham.